cost eight hundred dollars, for I have put my whole year into it, and I wish it was a thousand times better."
And so, when the great iron tongue of the city bell swept over the snow the twelve strokes that announced Christmas day, if there was anywhere a happier home than ours, I am glad of it!
IN THE WILDERNESS
By Charles Dudley Warner
CONTENTS: HOW I KILLED A BEAR LOST IN THE WOODS A FIGHT WITH A
TROUT A-HUNTING OF THE DEER A CHARACTER STUDY (Old Phelps) CAMPING OUT A WILDERNESS ROMANCE WHAT SOME PEOPLE CALL PLEASURE
HOW I KILLED A BEAR
So many conflicting accounts have appeared about my casual encounter with an Adirondack bear last summer that in justice to the public, to myself, and to the bear, it is necessary to make a plain statement of the facts. Besides, it is so seldom I have occasion to kill a bear, that the celebration of the exploit may be excused.
The encounter was unpremeditated on both sides. I was not hunting for a bear, and I have no reason to suppose that a bear was looking for me. The fact is, that we were both out blackberrying, and met by chance, the usual way. There is among the Adirondack visitors always a great deal of conversation about bears,--a general expression of the wish to see one in the woods, and much speculation as to how a person would act if he or she chanced to meet one. But bears are scarce and timid, and appear only to a favored few.
It was a warm day in August, just the sort of day when an adventure of any kind seemed impossible. But it occurred to the housekeepers at our cottage--there were four of them--to send me to the clearing, on the mountain back of the house, to pick blackberries. It was rather a series